UTF-8 is an ASCII-preserving encoding method for
Unicode (ISO 10646), the Universal Character Set
(UCS). The UCS encodes most of the world's writing systems in a single
character set, allowing you to mix languages and scripts within a document
without needing any tricks for switching character sets. This web page is
encoded directly in UTF-8.

As shown HERE,
Columbia University's Kermit 95 terminal emulation
software can display UTF-8 plain text in Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, XP, or 2000
when using a monospace Unicode font like Andale Mono WT J or Everson Mono Terminal, or the lesser
populated Courier New, Lucida Console, or Andale Mono. C-Kermit can handle it too,
if you have a Unicode
display. As many languages as are representable in your font can be seen
on the screen at the same time.

This, however, is a Web page. Some Web browsers can handle UTF-8, some can't.
And those that can might not have a sufficiently populated font to work with
(some browsers might pick glyphs dynamically from multiple fonts; Netscape 6
seems to do this).
CLICK HERE
for a survey of Unicode fonts for Windows.

The subtitle above shows currency symbols of many lands. If they don't
appear as blobs, we're off to a good start!

The "I can eat glass" phrase and initial translations (about 30 of them)
were borrowed from Ethan Mollick's I Can Eat Glass page
(which disappeared on or about June 2004) and converted to UTF-8. Since
Ethan's original page is gone, I should mention that his purpose was to offer
travelers a phrase they could use in any country that would command a
certain kind of respect, or at least get attention. See Credits for the many additional contributions since
then. When submitting new entries, the word "hurt" (if you have a choice)
is used in the sense of "cause harm", "do damage", or "bother", rather than
"inflict pain" or "make sad". In this vein Otto Stolz comments (as do
others further down; personally I think it's better for the purpose of this
page to have extra entries and/or to show a greater repertoire of characters
than it is to enforce a strict interpretation of the word "hurt"!):

This is the meaning I have translated to the Swabian dialect.
However, I just have noticed that most of the German variants
translate the "inflict pain" meaning. The German example should
read:

In the Romanic languages, the variations on "fa male" (it) are probably
wrong, whilst the variations on "hace daño" (es) and "damaĝas" (Esperanto) are probably correct; "nocet" (la) is definitely right.

The northern Germanic variants of "skada" are probably right, as are
the Slavic variants of "škodi/шкоди" (se); however the Slavic variants
of " boli" (hv) are probably wrong, as "bolena" means "pain/ache", IIRC.

The latest revision (2006) of the official German orthography
has revived the comma around infinitive clauses commencing with
ohne, or 5 other conjunctions, or depending from a noun or
from an announcing demonstrative
(http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/regeln2006.pdf, §75).
So, it's again: Ich kann Glas essen, ohne mir zu schaden.

Best wishes,
Otto Stolz

The numbering of the samples is arbitrary, done only to keep track of how
many there are, and can change any time a new entry is added. The
arrangement is also arbitrary but with some attempt to group related
examples together. Note: All languages not listed are wanted, not just the
ones that say (NEEDED).

Yoruba: The third word is Latin letter small 'j' followed by
small 'e' with U+0329, Combining Vertical Line Below. This displays
correctly only if your Unicode font includes the U+0329 glyph and your
browser supports combining diacritical marks. The Lingala and Indic examples
also include combining sequences.

Includes Unicode 3.1 (or later) characters beyond Plane 0.

The Classic Mongolian example should be vertical, top-to-bottom and
left-to-right. But such display is almost impossible. Also no font yet
exists which provides the proper ligatures and positional variants for the
characters of this script, which works somewhat like Arabic.

Taiwanese is also known as Holo or Hoklo, and is related to Southern
Min dialects such as Amoy.
Contributed by Henry H. Tan-Tenn, who comments, "The above is
the romanized version, in a script current among Taiwanese Christians since
the mid-19th century. It was invented by British missionaries and saw use in
hundreds of published works, mostly of a religious nature. Most Taiwanese did
not know Chinese characters then, or at least not well enough to read. More
to the point, though, a written standard using Chinese characters has never
developed, so a significant minority of words are represented with different
candidate characters, depending on one's personal preference or etymological
theory. In this sentence, for example, "-tàng", "chia̍h",
"mā" and "bē" are problematic using Chinese characters.
"Góa" (I/me) and "po-lê" (glass) are as written in other Sinitic
languages (e.g. Mandarin, Hakka)."

Wagner Amaral of Pinese & Amaral Associados notes that
the Brazilian Portuguese sentence for
"I can eat glass" should be identical to the Portuguese one, as the word
"machuca" means "inflict pain", or rather "injuries". The words "faz
mal" would more correctly translate as "cause harm".

Burmese: In English the first person pronoun "I" stands for both
genders, male and female. In Burmese (except in the central part of Burma)
kyundaw (က္ယ္ဝန္‌တော္‌) for male and kyanma (က္ယ္ဝန္‌မ) for female.
Using here a fully-compliant Unicode Burmese font -- sadly one and only Padauk
Graphite font exists -- rendering using graphite engine.
CLICK HERE to test Burmese
characters.

The "I can eat glass" sentences do not necessarily show off the orthography of
each language to best advantage. In many alphabetic written languages it is
possible to include all (or most) letters (or "special" characters) in
a single (often nonsense) pangram. These were traditionally used in
typewriter instruction; now they are useful for stress-testing computer fonts
and keyboard input methods. Here are a few examples (SEND MORE):

Other phrases commonly used in Germany include: "Ein wackerer Bayer
vertilgt ja bequem zwo Pfund Kalbshaxe" and, more recently, "Franz jagt im
komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern", but both lack umlauts and
esszet. Previously, going for the shortest sentence that has all the
umlauts and special characters, I had
"Grüße aus Bärenhöfe
(und Óechtringen)!"
Acute accents are not used in native German words, so I was surprised to
discover "Óechtringen" in the Deutsche Bundespost
Postleitzahlenbuch:

It's a small village in eastern Lower Saxony.
The "oe" in this case
turns out to be the Lower Saxon "lengthening e" (Dehnungs-e), which makes the
previous vowel long (used in a number of Lower Saxon place names such as Soest
and Itzehoe), not the "e" that indicates umlaut of the preceding vowel.
Many thanks to the Óechtringen-Namenschreibungsuntersuchungskomitee
(Alex Bochannek, Manfred Erren, Asmus Freytag, Christoph Päper, plus
Werner Lemberg who serves as
Óechtringen-Namenschreibungsuntersuchungskomiteerechtschreibungsprüfer)
for their relentless pursuit of the facts in this case. Conclusion: the
accent almost certainly does not belong on this (or any other native German)
word, but neither can it be dismissed as dirt on the page. To add to the
mystery, it has been reported that other copies of the same edition of the
PLZB do not show the accent! UPDATE (March 2006): David Krings was
intrigued enough by this report to contact the mayor of Ebstorf, of which
Oechtringen is a borough, who responded:

From Karl Pentzlin (Kochel am See, Bavaria, Germany):
"This German phrase is suited for display by a Fraktur (broken letter)
font. It contains: all common three-letter ligatures: ffi ffl fft and all
two-letter ligatures required by the Duden for Fraktur typesetting: ch ck ff
fi fl ft ll ſch ſi ſſ ſt tz (all in a
manner such they are not part of a three-letter ligature), one example of f-l
where German typesetting rules prohibit ligating (marked by a ZWNJ), and all
German letters a...z, ä,ö,ü,ß, ſ [long s]
(all in a manner such that they are not part of a two-letter Fraktur
ligature)."
Otto Stolz notes that "'Schloß' is now spelled 'Schloss', in
contrast to 'größer' (example 4) which has kept its
'ß'. Fraktur has been banned from general use, in 1942, and long-s
(ſ) has ceased to be used with Antiqua (Roman) even earlier (the
latest Antiqua-ſ I have seen is from 1913, but then
I am no expert, so there may well be a later instance." Later Otto confirms
the latter theory, "Now I've run across a book “Deutsche
Rechtschreibung” (edited by Lutz Mackensen) from 1954 (my reprint
is from 1956) that has kept the Antiqua-ſ in its dictionary part (but
neither in the preface nor in the appendix)."

Diaeresis is not used in Iberian Portuguese.

From Yurio Miyazawa: "This poetry contains all the sounds in the
Japanese language and used to be the first thing for children to learn in
their Japanese class. The Hiragana version is particularly neat because it
covers every character in the phonetic Hiragana character set." Yurio also
sent the Kanji version:

色は匂へど 散りぬるを
我が世誰ぞ 常ならむ
有為の奥山 今日越えて
浅き夢見じ 酔ひもせず

Accented Cyrillic:

(This section contributed by Vladimir Marinov.)

In Bulgarian it is desirable, customary, or in some cases required to
write accents over vowels. Unfortunately, no computer character sets
contain the full repertoire of accented Cyrillic letters. With Unicode,
however, it is possible to combine any Cyrillic letter with any combining
accent. The appearance of the result depends on the font and the rendering
engine. Here are two examples.

The UTF8-aware Kermit 95 terminal emulator on
Windows, to a Unix host with the EMACS text editor. Kermit
95 displays UTF-8 and also allows keyboard entry of arbitrary Unicode BMP
characters as 4 hex digits, as shown HERE. Hex codes
for Unicode values can be found in The Unicode
Standard (recommended) and the online code charts. When
submissions arrive by email encoded in some other character set (Latin-1,
Latin-2, KOI, various PC code pages, JEUC, etc), I use the TRANSLATE command
of C-Kermit on the Unix host (where I read my mail) to convert the character set to
UTF-8 (I could also use Kermit 95 for this; it has the same TRANSLATE
command). That's it -- no "Web authoring" tools, no locales, no "smart"
anything. It's just plain text, nothing more. By the way, there's nothing
special about EMACS -- any text editor will do, providing it allows entry of
arbitrary 8-bit bytes as text, including the 0x80-0x9F "C1" range. EMACS 21.1
actually supports UTF-8; earlier versions don't know about it and display the
octal codes; either way is OK for this purpose.

I just found out your website and it makes me feel like proposing an
interpretation of the choice of this peculiar phrase.

Glass is transparent and can hurt as everyone knows. The relation between
people and civilisations is sometimes effusional and more often rude. The
concept of breaking frontiers through globalization, in a way, is also an
attempt to deny any difference. Isn't "transparency" the flag of modernity?
Nothing should be hidden any more, authority is obsolete, and the new powers
are supposed to reign through loving and smiling and no more through
coercion...

Eating glass without pain sounds like a very nice metaphor of this attempt.
That is, frontiers should become glass transparent first, and be denied by
incorporating them. On the reverse, it shows that through globalization,
frontiers undergo a process of displacement, that is, when they are not any
more speakable, they become repressed from the speech and are therefore
incorporated and might become painful symptoms, as for example what happens
when one tries to eat glass.

The frontiers that used to separate bodies one from another tend to divide
bodies from within and make them suffer.... The chosen phrase then appears
as a denial of the symptom that might result from the destitution of
traditional frontiers.